Fibre artist and textile designer Ealish Wilson creates bespoke sculptural textiles that showcases materiality and craft. Her architectural and whimsical constructions are inspired by travel, fashion, photography, and traditional sewing techniques. Each piece contrasts the old with the new, building layers of constructed and deconstructed elements.

The art of making is at the heart of every step of the work. Making is not just an end point, but the very first step in the creation of each piece. Early samples, images, and textures are worked and reworked throughout the process. Materials are often converted to digital form, manipulated, then returned to textile to be meticulously finished by hand. 

Drawing on aesthetic traditions from Japan and the arts and crafts movement, Ealish’s personal touch is evident in all she produces. Whether the piece features many hours of smocking work or patterns carefully manipulated to trick the eye and create depth, the result of this meditative process is a work of timeless beauty and intricate simplicity.

Charming Voltage Electrophotographic Works By Kerry Laitala:

This body of work resides at the direct intersection between science and superstition, belief and manifestation. The materials range from vintage letter-press blocks to Mexican “Milagros” that are often left at churches and other places of worship. These objects, in the shape of hearts, legs, and kneeling forms, become talismans that help people with ailments, and desires that need to be met. A milagro representing an ailing heart might be left at a shrine to mend an aching heart. The work also takes into consideration Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I am interested in the way that “Objecthood”, and the aura of “Objecthood” has a market-place significance as opposed to time-based works that I have made over the past 25 years that have at their core an exploration of ephemeral experience. Similar to past works I have made with moving image, these photographs explore the projection of meaning onto inanimate objects. I am interested in the ways that the phenomenology of the process imprints a shimmery image made without a camera. The film is exposed by the build-up of ions that create a corona discharge on the surface of conductive objects. I take 4x5” format film, and using a generator of electricity, charge the atmosphere around these objects with ions that cause the film to be exposed.

I have made photograms, or as I call them Cinegrams making images directly onto photo sensitive film in the past using a flashlight to expose the film. The shadowgraphic trace of objects are left on the emulsion of the film. For this body of work the light that is generated comes directly from electricity and it is the corona discharge that creates the photographic impression.

I studied film and photography at Massachusetts College of Art and obtained my masters degree at SFAI in 1997. My website is: www.kerrylaitala.net

Renee McKenna, MA, lives and works in the Sunset District of San Francisco with her husband, 2 children and their dog.  Renee divides her time between her private hypnotherapy practice, teaching art to children, working with Art in Every Classroom, Inc, the non-profit that she helped found and doing her own artwork nights and weekends.

Renee's love of the sky, the sea and the city of San Francisco is reflected in her work. She has worked in acrylic for many years, and recently began experimenting with alcohol ink. 

 Though Renee is an accomplished painter and sculptor, her first love is public art.  Renee has many painted murals and mosaics in the Sunset District, including the 400 square foot tile mosaic at the South Sunset Playground  title "Nature Stream.". 

Alexandria Huff is a studio portrait photographer with a fondness for dark subjects, intimate closeups, and chiaroscuro style lighting. She teaches single light portrait photography at Rayko Photo Center and writes photography tutorials for 500px.  Her collection from earlier this year focuses on storytelling through combining street photography and tenebristic portraits. She is most recently exploring tronies - unidentifiable characters that mask the real subject. 

The themes of my paintings are memory, quiet places, impermanence, movement, energy, despair and hope. My influences are Buddhism, Minimalism, Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, and Paul Klee.

Painting is my meditation. It keeps me grounded in the present moment where reality is happening. My paintings do not reflect reality. They often depict imaginary places or memories I've conjured up while brushing, scrubbing, scrapping, dripping, or dropping paint on surfaces receptive to my inner world. I am searching for a way out of the darkness and for a place to belong, a place to call home. Meanwhile, I create quiet places to rest on my journey home.

Arion Press matches the finest contemporary art with the finest literature, past and present, in books that are beautifully designed and produced. Founded by Andrew Hoyem in 1974, the Arion Press publishes deluxe, limited-edition books, many of them printed by letterpress, illustrated by prominent artists, and some accompanied by separate editions of original prints. Since 2001, Arion Press has been a cultural tenant at the Presidio, the National Park in San Francisco, where it shares a handsome industrial building with its second division, M & H Type—the oldest and largest type foundry in the United States, serving the font and typesetting needs of letterpress printers around the world—as well as its nonprofit adjunct, the Grabhorn Institute.

IN DIFFERENT LIGHT

I have been obsessed with photography since I was 12.  My challenge back then was, as it still is now, to present a perspective of our world that is just different enough for the viewer to take notice.  In our everyday lives we often gain insight into a problem that had been confounding us simply by taking a different approach, or if we are lucky enough, see the answer through another person's eyes.  In reality that answer had been there all along, waiting for us to discover.  Similarly, a scene that is considered mundane may become interesting under different conditions.  Those conditions could be anything - time of day, angle of view, the mindset of the viewer, the mood of the photographer.

So it is with these images that I welcome you to see our world in a different light.